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21
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
30/100Critics
13/100Scholars
Author:
Stephen Wertheim
Publisher:
Belknap Press
Date:
October 27, 2020
How did the United States appoint itself as the world's supreme military power? Stephen Wertheim delves into the archives of the U.S. foreign policy elite to trace armed dominance to its origin in World War II. He shows how officials and intellectuals suddenly chose to embrace perpetual dominance--at the price of perpetual war.
What The Reviewers Say
In writing the history of the country’s decision to embrace a militarist vision of world order—and to do so, counterintuitively, through the creation of the United Nations—Wertheim provides an importantly revisionist account of U.S. foreign policy in the 1940s, one that helps us think anew about internationalism today.
... unique in its near-exclusive focus on domestic U.S. history.
... no historian before Mr. Wertheim has shown in such detail how a small, networked bunch of Ivy League-elite public intellectuals and strategists ould step in and use the shock of France’s fall to articulate their visions of the path forward for the American Republic from their posts at such organizations as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Yale Institute for International Studies and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Acting as the State Department’s virtual 'think tank' for the country’s future, the CFR and the many planning sub-groups it spawned stepped forward to convince important senators, the broader Congress, the American newspapers and the public at large that their nation should now assume the many burdens of global leadership.
In asserting that the choices made were recognized at the time as 'tragic,' Wertheim seemingly ignores the enormous threats the United States faced during World War II and the Cold War. He is on firmer ground in arguing that today U.S. global military dominance has outlived its original purpose..
